A large, new study offers reassuring news for people dealing with long COVID symptoms such as trouble breathing, mental fog and loss of taste or smell: most of these issues resolve within a year for those who had mild COVID-19.

The paper, published in the BMJ, is one of the longest follow-up studies in patients with mild SARS-CoV-2 infection to date.

“Although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, we observed that most health outcomes arising after a mild disease course remained for several months and returned to normal within the first year,” the researchers concluded.

“This nationwide dataset of patients with mild COVID-19 suggests that mild disease does not lead to serious or chronic long-term morbidity in the vast majority of patients and adds a small continuous burden on healthcare providers.”